Great points. I agree that music notation is a mess. I'd rather not have dotted notes and so forth in Compose. They aren't meaningful unless you already know mu

Great points. I agree that music notation is a mess. I'd rather not have dotted notes and so forth in Compose. They aren't meaningful unless you already know music notation, and it's no more work to specify, say, a three-beat long note via other means. They do, however, serve as a nice illustration of the combinator library pattern that Compose is teaching. As for jitter, I think one advantage of music DSLs is they make it easier to play with this kind of thing then tediously hand tweaking times in graphical software. You could modulate attack by a sine wave, for instance, to try to produce a more sophisticated imitation of swing. (Personally I'd rather explore new forms of music than try to replicate analog forms, but each to their own.) And yes, it is definitely a lot like designing a programming language. Compose has a role in our training material, and the ultimate end of our curriculum is teaching elements of programming language design. The interpreter is considered by many in the functional programming community to be the master pattern underlying all others.